Timeless motion: (dancing history in) queer time, identity, and the revolving door of the closet

In Western concert dance, representations of identity on stage have come to be complicated by the passage of time. The stage is both a museum for history, as well as a site for contemporary performance. In dialogue with visual and performative markers of queer and Latinx performance, this project will provide a unique form of self-identification, filtered through multiple generations of choreographers. This thesis is projected as an exploration of identity throughout time; enacting memory in the present, imagining queer futures, and attending to the “prison” of here and now. Through the presentation of José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, a duet with colleague Juliet Remmers by Joshua Peugh, and a solo by Brenda Serrata Tally, I hope to collapse time, presenting my dancing body as a fabulation of dance’s history. Through these fabulations I aim to employ a queer rehearsal methodology, where my collaborators and I will investigate modes of transmitting dance that resist concert dance’s traditional relationship between choreographer, performer, and time. With a deep interest in gesture and inscription as simultaneous reifiers of the past and advancers of future, my goal is to interrogate through the moving body how dancing is not just a reflection of what has been, but also a gesture to what could be.